“He ate what he could beg, slept where he could find whatever meager shelter, slipped invisibly as air past white people driving wagons down dusty roads or congregating on plank-board walks in war-smashed towns barely deserving of names. He knows that he has only the slimmest chance of succeeding. Sam, a self-educated employee of the Philadelphia Free Library who fought as a Union soldier, decides to find his wife, Tilda, from whom he was sold away 15 years before. The North may have won the war, but in the nightmarish world of “ Freeman” many of the worst horrors of slavery have not ended. In the several weeks since the war ended and he began his frightful odyssey south from Philadelphia, Sam has lost an arm, contracted a disabling infection in his foot, been beaten and stomped to within an inch of his life and witnessed any number of his fellow “freedmen” lynched, pressed back into de facto bondage, forcibly separated from their families or hunted down and shot like wild animals. Sam Freeman, an ex-slave who has just walked a thousand miles through a war-torn land of chaos and lawlessness, can only agree. About two-thirds of the way through Leonard Pitts Jr.’s powerful novel about post-Civil War America, a former slave owner remarks that while civilization began in Greece, Mississippi may well be “where it will end.”
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